Put a different way, theoretically a media channel builds up a reputation for integrity & quality in their coverage of news. News Junkies turn to the channel they trust, meaning more viewers. More viewers means more advertising dollars. More advertising dollars means more profit.

Having said that, there seems to be a sick symbiosis where the tv junkies get a high on the 'state of fear', and are addicted to that adrenaline rush type of feeling. So turn to the channel with the most fear mongering stories, even if those stories have little or no basis in reality.

aa5 » December 13th, 2016, 3:10 pm wrote:Having said that, there seems to be a sick symbiosis where the tv junkies get a high on the 'state of fear', and are addicted to that adrenaline rush type of feeling. So turn to the channel with the most fear mongering stories, even if those stories have little or no basis in reality.

Agreed. And I doubt they would recognize it as addiction at all. They would say that they "like being informed."

You make an excellent point about the "adrenaline rush" that comes with "breaking news alerts" and the drama. I wonder if a part of that is the excitement of having something new to blab about with friends and family the next time they see each other.

Is authentic human connection so lacking as to create a co-dependency on media to fill that void? Alternatively, perhaps some people simply use the "news" (even if a bit begrudgingly or put off by it) to avoid not being able to "fit in" ? There is a lot of fundamental psychology obviously being exploited here.

It should go without saying, but that's a LOT of power when the psychotic infotainment industry gets to essentially occupy the mind of the individual and the collective (with some exceptions) via mass programming.

I have to wonder what they would actually do IF "the people" were to suddenly "snap out of it" en mass. I'm sure that will remain an academic question, but it's an interesting one to consider.

Thanks for the insight into why some people (that I love dearly) are so reluctant to let go of their trusted TV personas.

It might be worth noting this as we discuss how to go about reaching people in our lives, and in turn helping to set them free.

Also, this serves to demonstrate my suspicion that they aren't too concerned with our "free speech,” when most people are simply parroting the trash that has been jammed down their throats for their entire lives.

Any "dangerous speech" can (for the most part) be isolated or at least contained.

Thanks, I like your example of the 'Breaking News' with scary music that makes peoples hearts jump.

At some point I realized that what most people seek is emotional engagement. In the textbooks and in the cultural background is the idea that people seek calmness, happiness, stability, etc.. Sure people like to experience those emotions too, but really people want to intensely feel all of their emotions. Jealousy, anger, fear, sadness too. In fact the negative emotions are usually stronger, so people are if anything more attracted to those.

Like when people get in some big drama with another person, they should just walk away. But they keep coming back to the well. Many/most people spend their whole lives in high intensity petty dramas with other people, and get nowhere in life, yet they would probably choose to do the exact same again because of the emotional highs.

Or how people drive absurdly aggressively even as it is obvious that it rarely gets them to the destination faster, is costly in speeding tickets and accidents and is stressful. But that is just the point, they get their adrenal system pumped, they get the feeling of power with rage going. You can't convince someone to stop doing something the enjoy. What makes it hard to see is that the people themselves don't realize consciously that they are doing this. They just find themselves continually drawn into these emotionally intense situations, like a crack addict finds themselves with 'place preference'.

+1 aa5 - extremes of emotion are equally dangerous, or at least they are if you want to have any peace inside your head. Of course, the negative extremes are more common, because they are the core of the nonsense piped into our minds by television, films, etc. but I see the place of the positive extremes as just as important a part of the manipulation. A person can watch the 'news' on TV, which will, like all news, try to engender fear, anger, worry, or all of the above. Then, there's an ad break that tells us what buttons we need to press in order to have some positive extremes of emotion, i.e. buying yet more shit on the basis that we will get more money, sex, approval, and that will in turn make us happy.

Otherwise intelligent people are sucking this shit up all day, every day. About seven years ago, I moved into a friends spare room in his flat, and he didn't have a television. I was there for about nine months, during which time I watched zero television, didn't go to the cinema, didn't listen to the radio, or read newspapers. Not only was it a very pleasant period, where I did a lot more of the actual 'real' stuff in my life, and somehow loosened the grip of the brainwashing. I then moved in with my partner, and we watch films and bits and bobs on TV - I was amazed by just how blatant the brainwashing is, if you haven't been exposed to it for a while.

I must add though, about a year before the no-TV zone, I was about to die from alcoholism, and when it came to a head, I had a 'fuck this shit' moment, and started living my life with a lot more self-awareness, and most importantly I had to get honest with myself, as I hadn't been for years, in fact my whole life to that point. Once I got honest with myself, I could much more easily spot dishonesty in others - an interesting by-product of having to get my shit together. Which was the only option other than death that was available to me. (FWIW, I've been sober for just under eight years).

That sounds very possible that they use extreme negative emotion for the show to draw people in and upset them, then positive, feel good things for the ads. Probably also you have to break up the negativity anyway, like a roller coaster ride.

15 years ago when I gave up tv, I hadn't seen it for like 6 months, then at a friends house I couldn't believe how blatant the propaganda was. It was like cringe worthy. There was some fiction shows that I liked, but the same ideology being pushed hard in every episode made it boring. For one thing it becomes too predictable. I am a libertarian, but if every show had the same ideology as an Ayn Rand novel it would get boring and annoying pretty quickly. Eventually I would be cheering for the smug, lecturing freedom guys & girls to have their faces smashed in. But since those freedom guys & girls would win in the end in every episode it would also get really frustrating to watch.

Funny thing with 'news', was I used to think I knew it was all biased, and which channels/newspapers were biased in which way, but obviously that was based on good old-fashioned 'they can't fool me, I'm intelligent!' thinking. Only when I'd stopped dripping it all into my head for a while did I become capable of understanding that it's all fabricated bullshit and more importantly, the entire media is controlled to play with us in different ways.

There must be huge amounts of people who will sneer at those who consume the sensationalist tabloid newspapers, thinking they are far too intelligent to be sucked in by such nonsense, and that their 'intelligent' newspaper choice marks them out as superior in some way, or 'well-read', and aware of exactly what's going on in the world.

I'm now only too well aware what this means - I very likely know far less than I used to think I do. And what I currently think might be what's going on could very easily and quickly turn out to be totally wrong at any time. The difference for me these days, is that I am not afraid of being wrong, or being seen to be wrong. This is the button that the propaganda presses most frequently. Because this is the button connected to the only thing people really and truly fear: being alone.

Sorry, I totally didn't fully qualify what I meant with that last sentence. I was referring to the 'in/out' fear that comes into play when for instance someone brings up a non-mainstream opinion, such as the nuke hoax, or the impossibility of space travel, or whatever. Social norms, programmed by the propaganda, use people's existing social mechanisms to label 'outsiders' as such. The 'outsider' then quite often drops his avenue of being different, as there is a warning light going on in his subconscious indicating that he will have no friends if he keeps this behaviour up.

This is the crux of the cognitive dissonance that many people suffer from - their intelligence tells them one thing, but their amygdala tells them under no circumstances to push it, OK? All the propaganda is designed to make sure even doubters understand what they are meant to be thinking, so that when under pressure, they can conform easily and stop worrying about being alone.

Thanks Simon - I think it's really instructive to us all, despite the evidence of much fakery, to observe the reactions and behaviour of others. Whilst we can only speculate exactly who the Nutwork are, and their precise goals, the sheer power of the effects on people's perception is quite obviously a desired outcome of the propaganda. It's too easy to forget that here we are people who have recognised the nonsense for what it is, but in most cases we started from a position of believing what we were told. Expecting a brainwashed psyop-believer to suddenly switch to awareness of all the fakery is pretty unrealistic. I started from 9/11, watching the towers fall and knowing it just didn't look right. I then spent another 8 years going through all the usual suspects like Alex Jones, suspecting 7/7 immediately from the start. But only when I found CF did I understand that I'd been climbing through honeytrap after honeytrap on the way. The Nuke Hoax was what really clarified things for me.

The biggest hurdle for anyone to get over is that of accepting that all of the worlds media and governments are totally controlled. I think that's why many people accept the moon landings - it's not because they study the evidence and come to a conclusion. It's because accepting them as fake would require them to accept that oh so much more is also fake. Pride prevents this course of action.

Very cogent and sobering thoughts, bongostaple. Thanks for reminding us what it's all about.

In this latest post by CluedIn, we see what (on the surface) appears to be some measure of the public's tolerance for money and trivial suits changing the very underpinnings of the Constitution.

CluedIn » December 20th, 2016, 2:28 pm wrote:It's time to kick start the final phase of this FF. Pulse families are suing Twitter, FB & Google (i.e. Youtube) for allowing tewwowists to be created on the internet. Free speech will be the first real victim of this farce.

But perhaps it's a bit less alarmist than that, still. From the article:

“Section 230 is a free pass to online service providers as long as they act only as a pass-through,” Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University Of Buffalo School Of Law, told FoxNews.com. “If you set up a place for people to talk, but don't communicate on it yourself, then you are basically immune from prosecution.”

Section 230 of the CDA has protected social media sites in the past, but some lawyers and academics have begun to argue sites like Facebook may be violating the provision with their heavily-guarded algorithms. Despite these algorithms having come under fire before – from how Facebook curated its Trending Topics to accusations that YouTube was censoring people – this lawsuit alleges something much more nefarious behind one of the tech world’s most secretive processes.

Would it really be all that bad for the public to have concrete evidence of YouTube's and Facebook's algorithms?

One has the sense that a public release of the algorithms would be so heavily modified that it would serve to disprove the backdoors or even casual futzing with numbers that happens to videos and accounts they wish to downplay.

I wonder if this is really an attack on free speech, or if it's more like a way to pretend to pony up social media code that doesn't match how the systems actually work.

All tied into their fake history and grand Sims adventure that "citizenship" has largely become.

Or this is a way for the State to lean on social media platforms as they intend to add even more legal layers and protections preventing average people from uncovering the guts of their system. If the "Anonymous" group were legit, wouldn't they be hard at work exposing exactly such code to everyone?

Terrorism experts and social media monitors say these postings are a sign of ISIS’ expanding use of social media to recruit and radicalize followers and of the difficulties faced by both governments and private companies to properly combat accounts maintained by terror groups.

What is so damn hard about combating terror group accounts? They have ID'd them, monitor them but then tell us they have difficulties? We are to believe that the "authorities" are aware that ISIS has Twitter & FB accounts and actually publish a magazine and yet they never figure out any plans until after things go BOOM!

It's rather a large contradiction. If the social networks are so useless in pinning them down, the suit accusing the social networks of aiding terrorism is worthless. At worst, perhaps the social networks are giving agents as phony terrorists a place to post memes and cat videos. Will those be considered crimes? I guess we're not meant to actually think about the information, merely feel primed for legislation.

One thing I've learned working in the professional world, is you have to read the actual laws, papers from the regulatory agencies and ideally some court rulings on the law. Sometimes there are journalists which have an amazingly good description of how the law actually works, but usually descriptions from the media, let alone people explaining it in person to other people, are not even remotely close to what the law really is.

I have often gotten worked up over people or media explaining how some law works, thinking in my mind how idiotic that is, to then go and read the actual law and think, hey actually this is pretty reasonable.

aa5 » December 20th, 2016, 11:39 pm wrote:One thing I've learned working in the professional world, is you have to read the actual laws, papers from the regulatory agencies and ideally some court rulings on the law. Sometimes there are journalists which have an amazingly good description of how the law actually works, but usually descriptions from the media, let alone people explaining it in person to other people, are not even remotely close to what the law really is.

I have often gotten worked up over people or media explaining how some law works, thinking in my mind how idiotic that is, to then go and read the actual law and think, hey actually this is pretty reasonable.

Well, I rarely find laws to be sensible or reasonable. And that is setting aside the bigger Constitutional questions.

But that said, you are spot on about the VAST disparity between what the law (if any) actually IS, and what is Reported.

For that matter, how something becomes "law" is not a straightforward matter by any means. So, even if the media were interested in accuracy, I doubt they could/would get it right most.

If any of you actually see a bill (potential law), a law, or court ruling that purports to affect free speech, please post it here so I can have a look. Since I practice Constitutional law, I might be able to shed some light on the matter.

I'm glad we have this topic here. It's highly important, especially when fundamental rights are under attack.